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Okay, now try that in the waking world. Shoot yourself or stab yourself or poison yourself and see if you can "consciously choose the alternate reality" where blowing your brains out was only a dream. It won't work, and if it does, come back and tell us and I'll then believe in quantum immortality.
(Really, the lengths to which people go in thought experiments are baffling, when those same people scoff at religious believers who believe in souls and afterlifes. "Heaven is just a fairy tale, but the idea that there are uncounted worlds where you live forever because immortality is easy is reasonable thinking!")
You know, this snarky and borderline rules-breaking response makes me think that, back when Scott uncritically reposted the 4chan story about 90 IQ people not understanding conditional hypotheticals and was told that actually there's no way such failures happen at 90 IQ, that was dead wrong. Actually he should've been told that fairly smart people can't into conditional hypotheticals either. If their worldview depends on it, that is; cue Upton Sinclair. You miss the point in so many dimensions at once, and so smugly at that, it's pretty frustrating.
Hello! My story is precisely about such a scenario. I have accidentally or deliberately fucked myself up in dreams countless times – and probably an OOM more in forgotten ones. "Coming back" and telling is what I am doing. That it is not persuasive because the ontological status of the event is inherently low is the fucking point – if it happened «for real», I'd have been in no condition to reply.
What I'm describing is not a «quantum immortality theory» but a much less speculative, let's call it, «probabilistic-phenomenological immortality theory» that does not depend at all on there existing, in some sense other than metaphorical, bona fide alternative worlds, universes, timelines, any weird physics: it's explicitly about alternative mundane explanations for subjective experiences founded on the premise of human fallibility, especially with regard to ontological status of events. If I commit to killing myself and succeed, the most robust way for me to have subjective awareness after that (assuming materialism), and report on it, is if it turns out I have not even tried and have simply dreamed of doing it, or got otherwise confused about what's going on. This is, in fact, what happens, because while awake, I'm not really suicidal, prone to get baited into killing myself by an online troll, or interested in risky metaphysically motivated experiments.
This is relevant to @Hyperion's and @Glassnoser's arguments because it suggests the solution in the strongest case. Namely: given an observer's a) subjective observation that he's heading to certain death only a miracle could prevent and b) the assumption that he will not in fact die and cease observing, it is more plausible that he's wrong about his situation than that physics-breaking miracles (even evil ones, like a biologically implausible neverending agony) will happen and undo the death. Given that old people die, that he strongly believes «comfortable immortality is far away and out of reach for me», and conditional on him staying alive – between «eternal Tithonus torture because quantum timelines something something» and «nah man, it turns out technological immortality wasn't that hard» the latter is overwhelmingly more probable. People fail at reasoning infinitely more often than laws of physics fail to apply.
Right. The cool part is, this logic works the same way for afterlife and any religious miracle as for the sci-fi version of quantum immortality. You're shooting yourself in the foot here and I'm not sure it's possible for me to make that clear. I'm equally unsure if you are reflexively condescending without fully understanding the implications of this logic, or if you see them – and defend your views in such an indirect way.
You are the one recounting a dream where you willed yourself into another reality. If it's all only a dream, then poison yourself in this dream and will yourself into another reality - it's easy, you've already done it by report!
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